I think I may have found an occasion where Gaza's Christianity influences his paraphrase. In 16:180, Homer refers to the hero Eudoros as a παρθένιος. LSJ defines this as "the son of an unmarried girl." Gaza, perhaps to avoid any confusion with Jesus' virgin birth, writes:

Gaza 16:180: ὁ ἐκ νομιζομένης παρθένου τεχθείς.

Or maybe he just means she was thought to be (νομισαμένης? νενομισμένης?) a virgin until she began to show.

Scribo: I know if I buy them now though my current work will go neglected and I'll just devour them.

Yes, since purchasing print editions of Gaza I have not called my mother and my work has suffered and my apartment is a mess, but it's been worth every minute. I really can't imagine reading Homer any other way now. I almost never look up words in Cunliffe any more and my Loebs are gathering dust.

My Greek is not good enough to read Homer with Attic paraphrase, but my Latin is very good. For people in that position this edition is wonderful. The Latin gloss helps to understand the Greek quickly without ever making that mental transition to English. If I have to occasionally mentally translate from Greek into Latin, I figure that can only help my Latin.

I read this edition on my iPad, where I also have the Attikos app. It's pretty rare that I feel the need to switch over to Attikos and access the lexicon feature, but it's great to have the option.

Speaking of not being able to imagine reading Homer any other way, this isn't really relevant to the current post, but I've been using this lately: http://books.google.com/books/about/Hom ... EAAAAAYAAJ

My Greek is not good enough to read Homer with Attic paraphrase, but my Latin is very good. For people in that position this edition is wonderful. The Latin gloss helps to understand the Greek quickly without ever making that mental transition to English. If I have to occasionally mentally translate from Greek into Latin, I figure that can only help my Latin.

It's relevant to the current post because your experience with a Greek-Latin diglot is similar to, but not identical, to my experience with Gaza. The Latin spares you a trip to a lexicon or a grammatical commentary, and this is a huge plus. Like me, you avoid English, which at some point in learning Greek, one has to leave behind. After reading the Latin, your eyes can quickly scan back to the Greek without putting down and picking up another book--terrifically important for pleasurable, "armchair" reading.

Now, one can say that in your case, you are still leaving the target language, but three points: 1. An argument can be made that I am leaving the target language too, since Homeric Greek is really rather different from Gaza's Attic/Koine. 2. You, like me, are leaving the target language for another language which you love, Latin, and are trying to learn, so there is no downside to this. It's like a bigamist cheating on his wife with his other wife. 3. An argument can be made that Latin betrays Homer less than English, since much of the genius of Homer lies with the simplicity of his grammar and how he uses the cases and word order for tremendous poetic effect. I think a good Latin version can convey some of this, as the two languages are somewhat similar in underlying structure.

Bottom line, if I were learning Latin, I would not read Homer in any other way either. Some people enjoy reading the Greek NT this way as well.

It's not as big as an infidelity as you think actually, there is a process called something like triangulation. Learning languages through other non native ones and the benefit there too. Gaza has the advantage of also serving as v. interesting intellectual/literary history.

Speaking of which, not entirely tangential, I'll put some excerpts up in a few weeks from an article I'm writing on translation/interpretation of Homer in the ancient world, this thread sort of made me go back to it.

I'll put some excerpts up in a few weeks from an article I'm writing on translation/interpretation of Homer in the ancient world, this thread sort of made me go back to it.

I will look forward to this. Any information you can gather on Gaza will be appreciated. I would really like to know why he wrote his paraphrase, who read it and why? I would like to know if he used Psellos directly and what were his other sources? What was his spoken language like? Heck, I would even like to know stuff that I doubt we can ever know, how long did it take him to write it, how was it received, did he enjoy the process or did it become tedious? Who paid him to write it, and were they happy with the result?

I'd also like to know more about his 1812 editor Nikolaos Theseus. What did he have in mind publishing his edition? Was there a tradition of these types of parallel editions?

Above all, although you may not be addressing this in your article, I would like to know why Gaza did not catch on. How come everyone has heard of Cunliffe and Monroe and Leaf, and now Steadman, but no one uses Gaza to learn Homeric Greek? What happened to the seemingly-at-one-time flourishing tradition of reading, to say nothing of writing, pedagogical paraphrases?

I'll put some excerpts up in a few weeks from an article I'm writing on translation/interpretation of Homer in the ancient world, this thread sort of made me go back to it.

I will look forward to this. Any information you can gather on Gaza will be appreciated. I would really like to know why he wrote his paraphrase, who read it and why? I would like to know if he used Psellos directly and what were his other sources? What was his spoken language like? Heck, I would even like to know stuff that I doubt we can ever know, how long did it take him to write it, how was it received, did he enjoy the process or did it become tedious? Who paid him to write it, and were they happy with the result?

Ah Marke these are all generally unanswerable questions I fear, though interesting. (Bar the one about his spoken language, at this point it was basically modern Greek with a higher literary register). As for his use of Psellos...dependency could be worked out, but would require extensive reading, alas. I really would like to know the target audience but I suspect there is next to no scholarship on the matter. I've contacted some Byzantinistas on the general intellectual milieu.

Above all, although you may not be addressing this in your article, I would like to know why Gaza did not catch on. How come everyone has heard of Cunliffe and Monroe and Leaf, and now Steadman, but no one uses Gaza to learn Homeric Greek? What happened to the seemingly-at-one-time flourishing tradition of reading, to say nothing of writing, pedagogical paraphrases?

You know...this is interesting in and of itself. I suspect the answer is multifaceted. I mean honestly, I like them. I could never see there use in a proper Homeric philology class since there is so much more going on in Homer himself and we encourage people to read him alongside other early epic rather than, say, loebs. But...I don't know, I really do see the use for general reading depending on one's level of Greek. I suspect availability has something to do with it. Though I should point out that in general Byzantine periphrases, synopses and scholia are used. Maybe...the Homerists have no use for it and the non Homerists have no use for Homer? Its sad...I was so excited at seeing a friend of mine reading Homer not so long ago considering he's soooo far back from her period (the novellae) and yet when I mentioned this I was told that he's boring, unpolished and laborious and that she's only reading him again out of necessity.

I'm not sure how much I'll get to address alas. Originally the paper I gave was on reception and translation of Homer in the later Greek and Roman world (Hellenistic to Roman) so the later stuff won't be that late and I'm not sure how to fit everything together yet. I'm just re-writing and researching and letting it flow together. Then I will throw this paper down, and it will be such a paper that no men modern day men may lift.

Edit: Bede, woah, I'm not sure which I want now! the letter paper ones are tempting...I'm not sure what size suits me best. I'm going to measure my book cases when I get back.

For those who are interested, I have prepared letter-size (8.5" wide x 11" tall) editions of the two volumes:

Iliad with Paraphrase of Theodorus Gaza (Tome I and II)Iliad with Paraphrase of Theodorus Gaza (Tome III and IV)

I just got my copy of the giant print volume 1 in the mail. I had ordered it a week ago, $20.00 plus $4.00 shipping. I had already purchased all four volumes from the Expresso Book machine, but I really enjoy reading Greek with a large font.

I love it. It is indeed the size of a piece of standard copy paper, and the font size is very large, about 3x the size of the Loeb fonts, about as big as you get on a Giant Print Bible. I estimate it to be about 16 point font size. Blowing up the text does NOT result in this being any more bleary than the smaller size, but makes it much easer to read precisely because the scan is not ideal. One still has room in the margins for notes. The binding looks pretty tight, and there is a cool picture on the front. The book, maybe because it is so big, lies open in your hand. Highly recommended.

...he sat down on the shore of the gray sea, looking out at the wine-faced (i.e. dark) ocean.

It's been noted that Homer often prefers poetry and poetic convention to realism. ("The loud-barking hounds remained silent.") This line, though, was probably not felt as jarringly unrealistic because these color terms are not precise. One can imagine the ocean being "gray" at the shore because of the waves, but further out looking "dark" the way wine presumably looked dark in a Greek goblet.

And colours - it's little appreciated how languages divide up the visible spectum of light in their own way - our red orange yellow etc is of course completely arbitrary- the spectrum is a continuum. The Greeks had very few real colour-words- Homer's "wine-looking, wine-faced" sea is a typical circumlocution (if it in fact means that - the traditional "wine-dark" is a romantic suggestion).

It's worth brushing up on formulae and metrics to get a better understanding of the mechanics of this stuff: Pro: It heavily improves your grasp of said poets (Homer, Hesiod et al) Cons: You write hexameters in Greek about everything until your tutor and girlfriend both ban you because you apparently don't have a swift footed cat who emits loud shouts etc.

Colour terms in Greek are annoying, Bernard Knox I think it is has an interesting essay on this floating around. We tend to immediately regularise them to our own conceptions. The typical linguistic example is the usage of "blonde" and how it varies across northern European languages. In Greek terms its worth pointing out that something like /ksanthos/ doesn't mean our blonde...but is also used for cooked meat and even eyes, yet they often described Keltoi as being /leukos/ ("white haired") which is of course, absurd to us. Most readers tend to gloss these, but on your second or third time through you start to pick up on this stuff more and it adds an interesting shade. Which reminds me something.

I'm envious, its been a few weeks now since I've had the time to all but glance at Homer properly.

I think more often than not if we think epithets in Homer seem ridiculous, it's because we don't properly understand them. Amymon is a case in point (not "blameless" but "handsome"), there's an excellent monograph on the subject by Anne Amory Parry called Blameless Aegisthus, the main point being that all those epithets often start making sense if we honestly try to understand what they mean.

As for colour terms, I think the basic mistake is to think they just mean a hue, a specific wavelength of the visible spectrum. I think polios applied to water means basically "foaming" for example, it implies much more than just dull "gray". When water is called melan hydor, it can imply for that the water comes from a deep underground source as in δ 359. Leukos has connotation of brightness.

I'm not sure how we missed this guy. In the secondary literature on Homeric paraphrase that I cited above, I did not see him mentioned. He has also done Ancient Greek paraphrases of the Odyssey, Sophocles, Pindar, Thucydides and others.

Note how Doukas drops out the epithets ἱπποκορυσταὶ and νήδυμος and how he reverses the word order of the clauses. Elsewhere, like Gaza, Doukas adds his own explanatory/interpretive expansions.

One feature of Doukas which will delight Greek paraphrase junkies is that in the places where Homer virtually repeats the same line in several places, Doukas will sometimes render the same line in different words, adding yet another layer of paraphrase.

When I get stuck on the original, I routinely use my Gaza as an alternative to bilingual lexicons, translations and L1 grammar notes. Since Doukas does not follow the original as closely as does Gaza or Psellos, he may be less useful here. But one can use him as a back up when when is stumped by both Homer and Gaza. And, as a stand-alone piece of literature, Doukas may be more enjoyable (though a little harder) than Gaza. Needless to say, I am thrilled to have found him.

Would it not be cool to someday have a parallel edition, even if only of one book, of all the available paraphrases?

As you can see, the font on the on-line Doukas is better than the one we have for Gaza. It would be easier to do Optical Character Recognition scans with it, to make even better editions.

Right now I am reading Doukas' Ajax, about which I am even more excited. Reading his paraphrase allows the difficult text of Sophocles' original to become comprehensible to me without leaving L2. This makes it one of the best kept secrets of monolingual resources, so again I thank Joel and Roberto for discovering him. I wonder if Rouse, who in Greek Boy did his own similar paraphrase of a few lines from the Persians, knew of Doukas?